


reach for the latch

by patrokla



Category: Cobra Kai (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Yuletide, post-season 2 finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:14:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28146669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: He’d thought about starting over, as he’d stumbled home from the beach, his car left abandoned in the parking lot. He felt that there was just enough left in him to try life one more time. But it only took the thought of Kreese in the dojo that had been Johnny’s, with the students Johnny had failed, to dissuade him from that kind of idiotic optimism. There just wasn’t anything left to try.or, after everything, Johnny thinks about starting over. Instead, he just…stops.
Relationships: Miguel Diaz & Johnny Lawrence
Comments: 6
Kudos: 42
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	reach for the latch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [great_whatsit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/great_whatsit/gifts).



> Title and epigraphs from Mary Oliver's "Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long, Black Branches?"
> 
> Happy Yuletide, great whatsit! I sat down to write a fic about Johnny Lawrence making a birthday cake, and then this happened. Hope you enjoy!

_Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?_   
_Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot_   
_in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself_   
_continually?_

—

As a kid, Johnny Lawrence hadn’t liked staying at home. Home was never a good place to be, especially if Sid was there, and the older he got the more reasons he had to be anywhere else - out training, or with Ali and his friends, or just hanging out at the beach with his Walkman and a head full of bright, bloody dreams. 

He doesn’t go down to the beach, now. Doesn’t shut down bars like he and Shannon had done for the better part of their 20s and 30s. He doesn’t even go driving, like he’d done in the years after Robby was born, when he’d been too bounded by responsibilities he never succeeded in taking up to feel like he could ever really leave Reseda, but always wanting to escape.

He’d thought about starting over, as he’d stumbled home from the beach, his car left abandoned in the parking lot. He felt that there was just enough left in him to try life one more time. But it only took the thought of Kreese in the dojo that had been Johnny’s, with the students Johnny had failed, to dissuade him from that kind of idiotic optimism. There just wasn’t anything left to try.

—

Life begins to pare back down again to what it’d been when he and Shannon split up for what ended up being the last time: working just enough to buy beer, put gas in the car, and pay rent - usually in that order of importance. Then, his greatest pains had been the low, festering despair he felt whenever he thought about Robby, and the various petty humiliations that came with doing odd jobs for people who sometimes looked at him and said “Johnny? Johnny Lawrence? I remember you from high school, man…”

He’d give anything to go back to that shit. It was like something in his head had been woken up in the last year, some part of him that wanted to hope. To do better. And now he couldn’t get that part to go back to sleep - or, better yet, to just die. It would never get him anywhere, wanting, and yet, even sitting alone in his apartment surrounded by empties, his head overflowed with wants, wishes, and regrets that spilled out into the room and looked out of place.

He drinks, and drinks some more, and in between the beer and the droning of the television, he manages to fall into a steady, unthinking daze.

—

He does have to leave his apartment eventually, to pick up beer and ponder buying food that isn't Chinese and pizza delivery, and because his life is the way it is, he runs into Carmen on his way back. He's not expecting her to acknowledge him at all, but she jerks her chin at him in a sort of neutral greeting, looking very tired, and sad.

“How is he,” Johnny asks. He’s scared to hear the answer, but spending too much time on his own has eroded all of his filters, and he really, desperately wants to know.

“Alive,” Carmen bites out. _No thanks to you_ , Johnny hears. “He came home this week. He - they think he’ll be able to walk again, in time.”

Johnny doesn’t know what to say to that. There’s a kind of horror in her tone, and he realizes, suddenly, all the hopes she must have had for Miguel, her only son, futures that must seem impossibly far away now. 

“He’s strong,” he says. “He’s, uh. Resilient.”

“Yes,” Carmen says, and then she turns back to her apartment door. 

Johnny goes back to fumbling with his keys, trying not to think about the life he’d imagined for Robby: anything better than his own. 

“Johnny,” Carmen says, and he looks over to see her crossing her arms, looking unhappy. “He wants to see you.”

“I - look, you said you didn’t want me around,” Johnny says, “so I haven’t been.”

“I don’t,” Carmen sighs, “but he does, and - it’s his birthday, tomorrow.”

 _And it’s not like you could fuck him up any worse_. She doesn’t say that, but it’s plain to see on her face. The damage has already been done.

“Okay,” Johnny says quietly. “If it’s okay with you.”

She smiles that thin, tired smile, and his own mouth twitches anemically in response. He has the sudden urge to reassure her that she’s nothing like him, has reached nowhere near the same levels of fucking up, but then, she probably already knows that.

“Tomorrow morning,” she says, and then she goes inside.

—

Miguel’s grandma opens the door the next morning, Carmen nowhere to be seen. It’s a relief, really, because she still seems to like Johnny a little. She looks exhausted, like Carmen, but she stops a moment in the kitchen, puts her hand on Johnny’s arm, and murmurs something that sounds, well, not hostile, anyway. 

“Thanks,” he says, and she pats his arm and takes him to Miguel’s room.

Miguel is…he’s in bed, but sitting up against the wall, which Johnny hadn’t expected, and he's wearing some kind of massive, unwieldy back brace. The bruises Johnny had seen on his face in the hospital are still there, and there’s a thin line of stitches on the side of his head from God only knows what kind of injury.

His eyes are closed, but they open as Johnny mutters, “Jesus, kid,” almost involuntarily. 

“Sensei!” He sounds sleepy and a little hoarse - probably high on pain meds, Johnny realizes, looking at his goofy smile and over at the spread of pill bottles on the bedside table. “I didn’t know if you were gonna show up.”

“I-“ Johnny starts, his throat suddenly feeling very tight. He doesn’t know what to say.

He finally settles on, “Happy birthday,” and Miguel smiles that same dopey smile, although a little smaller, this time.

“They make you sleep in that thing?” Johnny asks, gesturing at the brace.

“Oh, no,” Miguel says. “I just…I wanted to be able to sit up, to see you, so I asked my mom…”

He drifts off mid-sentence, blinking slowly, then says, “Sorry, I just took my pills, probably gonna fall asleep soon.”

“That’s fine,” Johnny says. “I, uh. Just wanted to check on you, you know, see how things were going.”

He wants to take the words back as soon as he says them - seriously, Lawrence, how the fuck does it seem like things are going? But luckily Miguel seems too out of it to treat the question with the disdain it deserves. Or maybe just too fundamentally nice, because all he does is tilt his head to one side in what Johnny thinks might be as close to a shrug as he can get with the brace on.

“I’m tired a lot,” he sighs. “Kinda bored. Mom hasn’t let anyone come over until now. Do you - do you know how everyone else is? Sam?”

“Not really,” Johnny says, which sounds better than admitting he threw his phone into the ocean and hasn’t bothered to get a new one, and also he suspects that even if he did have his phone, no one would have contacted him about shit. “I bet they’re fine, they’re all -“ in the hospital or being brainwashed by Kreese “-tough, you know. Like you.”

“Yeah,” Miguel says forlornly. “I guess.”

Jesus. Johnny’s remembering now exactly what it was that made him start wanting to live again, and that reason is sitting five feet away from him with a shattered spine that may or may not heal. He doesn’t want to be here, but he also doesn’t want to be anywhere else. He wants to fix this, and he has no idea how.

“Are you gonna have a birthday cake?” he asks, mostly to distract himself from the yawning pit of despair in his chest. 

“I can’t really do solid foods right now,” Miguel says sleepily, and Johnny’s amazed, again, at the fact that he’d wanted to see Johnny at all. “But my mom said she was going to get chocolate milkshakes…”

His eyes close again as Johnny nods uselessly and says, “Yeah, chocolate’s great. Way better than vanilla.”

“I like vanilla frosting,” Miguel murmurs.

“Yeah, so does R- uh. Some people do,” Johnny says. “I used to make a pretty decent vanilla frosting back in the day.”

Twice, he’d made it twice, for the two birthdays of Robby’s that he’d actually shown up for. Angel food cake with vanilla icing, way too sweet for his taste, but Robby had loved it.

Miguel doesn’t say anything to that, seems to have finally drifted off. Johnny leaves after a minute, feeling wrung out and jittery all at once. He goes back to his apartment and has to go back outside immediately, overwhelmed by the musty, moldy smell from the multiple pizza boxes he’d left on the counter. All of the progress he’d made in the last few weeks to numb himself back into just existing, _gone_. For a moment, he’s furious. 

Just for a moment, though. He can't sustain it for long, not with the image of Miguel, hurt and healing, still fresh in his mind. He's going to need help, and if Carmen will let Johnny help, well - he wants to.

Johnny sighs, looks up at the sky, bright and California blue, and then goes back inside to clean up.

—

_Only last week I went out among the thorns and said_   
_to the wild roses:_   
_deny me not,_   
_but suffer my devotion._   
_Then, all afternoon, I sat among them._


End file.
